Re: pkgsrc cross-compilation

[Taylor R Campbell <campbell+netbsd-tech-pkg%mumble.net@localhost>]

   Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2013 11:27:31 -0400
   From: Greg Troxel <gdt%ir.bbn.com@localhost>

   Yes, I think that's the essence of what Aleksey is trying to do.  My
   issues in the dicussion were not about this essence.  IIRC, I was trying
   to get us to use the same language that other cross systems use.

Wooops!  Somehow I managed to read everything earlier in the thread
that cheusov@ pointed to the middle of, but not everything later, so
most of my message rehashed all that.  Sorry for the noise!

   I also believe (bit of a strawman) that any "build-time tool
   dependencies" as you call them should be expressed via USE_TOOLS, and
   it's a bug (now) to have them in BUILD_DEPENDS.

I'm a little reluctant to use USE_TOOLS for this purpose because the
language is kind of incoherent[*] and wires the tool names into the
pkgsrc infrastructure rather than into packages.  I'd rather say

TOOL_DEPENDS+=  flex-1.23:../../devel/flex

than say

USE_TOOLS+=     flex

and require the right machinery to be baked into mk/ and maintained
there.  I understand the motivation to bake in that machinery for
basic tools needed for bootstrap that may vary across platforms and be
backed by different pkgsrc paths and so need some canonicalization,
but I'd rather avoid it as a general case.


[*] See, e.g., PR pkg/45717 -- there are some bugs in the `foo' versus
`foo:run' distinction and the semantics isn't very clear to me, so
that I don't know how to refer to `the path at which the build can
execute a tool' separately from `the path which we can bake into a
package to execute a tool'.